Moustafa Bayoumi is an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College and the author of How Does it Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (2009). In this conversation, we talk about his graduate years working with Edward Said; his development as a scholar of postcolonial literature and theory; his extraordinary article "Disco Inferno," which chronicles the use of American popular music in the torture of (mostly Arab) detainees; and the particular cultural, political, and economic elements of the Arab-American and Muslim experience in post-9/11 America.